The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

setDirty( true )

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-29

Today's code snippet come to us from Carl Cerecke. Carl is currently deep within the bowels of a large government application trying to complete a minor defect fix. This application is used throughout the country of New Zealand by the front line staff dealing with a sizeable percentage of the citizens. Carl knows a couple of these front line staff personally and they hate the software. Carl writes, "I work for the large international software house that has the support and maintenance contract on this impenetrable piece of enterprisey spaghetti code."

Carl continues, "here's a piece of code that has nothing to do with the defect I'm trying to fix. At least I don't think it does. It did, however, jump out at me while scrolling through the file as an exemplar examplar of the sort of code littered around the project. I had to use a pen and paper to work out exactly what conditions the setDirty(true) call was made. It was no real surprise that the if statements can be replaced entirely by a much more understandable one-liner."

184 comments - Last comment @ 2019-03-08

Passwords! Get Your Free Passwords Here!

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-28

Today's Code Snippet comes from Christopher Stolworthy. Christopher has a friend who is attending an upstanding college to get his Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. One day this friend called him up... "He wanted me to test out his new login system that he had written in C#, using SQL Server. I agreed and he sent me his app. I was playing around with it when I noticed something interesting. After typing in my username I would begin to type my password, if I mistyped a character ANYWHERE in the field the app immediately threw an error. "This is interesting" I thought to myself. So I dove into the code, after a few minutes I found the following. He couldn't see where the security issue was, until I used "Admin" as the username and started guessing his password."

167 comments - Last comment @ 2023-08-08

The Seven Levels of SQL

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-27

This just absolutely amazes me.
RJ Writes, "When I first began working at the company in question, I was trying to get a handle on the flow of database queries during a fund transfer, so I enabled query logging, and stepped through an example transaction. (Platform, PHP/MySQL on Linux). For any who read this: DON'T PANIC - the system never saw real production use until after it was completely revamped in a proper DBMS.

Order of SQL Queries for "Dispatcher sending funds" transaction:

91 comments - Last comment @ 2009-07-16

XML vs CSV : The Choice is Obvious

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-21

Today's Code Snippet comes from Rob O. Rob was working in a company (as a contractor) on different projects for almost a year before he was asked to sit in on a meeting with two vendors and two business analysts. Rob failed to notice during the discussion one of the third parties furiously writing notes every time they were asked about XML.

They had not gotten very far with the technical details of the project, but the business analysts knew what they wanted. Buzz-word compliance. The buzz-word: XML.

120 comments - Last comment @ 2008-11-17

Triple Play

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-20

Today's Code Snippet of the day is legion. I ran across several snippets that don't necessarily stand on their own, but deserve to be gently* laughed at anyway. We start with a recursive error handler...

I.F. writes, "This might be interesting for discussion. Found in the wild on production system. management summary (in Java) of my investigation of a production bug.

 public boolean aMethod(Object anObject) {
  try {
   /*
    * Some 50 lines of unreadable obfuscated code littered with
    * return statements, throwing some exceptions and performing
    * various exception prone operations like:
    * - parsing
    * - database access
    * - calling other methods of similar signature (but not catching Exception)
    */
   return true;
  } catch (Exception e /*PANIC. NEVER DO THIS AT HOME*/) {
   //call a method of similar signature
   aMethod(anObject); //RECURSION in exception handler => BUG => PANIC
  }
 }

99 comments - Last comment @ 2008-10-11

We Have Met the Enemy

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-14

Today's Code Snippet comes from two different people, Nate and Mike. I felt these were each too small to post by themselves(maybe we'll get to 200 comments?!), so I decided to give a little more. To try a little harder. To reach a little deeper. To, to... Never mind, here's the code.

Nate writes, "Having recently started a new programming job, I've quickly discovered what most of the day-to-day grind entails: Deciphering and cleaning poorly written Visual Basic code before actually being able to perform my assigned work. Our code base has plenty of the usual suspects: Variables with meaningless names like "AA" and "bbb", thousand-line functions (which approach VB's built-in limits), no-ops, unreachable code, gobs of copy-and-pasted code, and a few instances of this little construct (irrelevant code removed):"

132 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-03

Please Select Fewer Files

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-13

Today's Code Snippet comes to us from Hank M. Hank writes, "It was my third week on the job, and that morning the custom compiler they wrote for their in-house language (steaming pile of WTFs) quit working." Standard debugging revealed that the executable didn't change, and reverting source control to when it worked, both source files and executable (just to make sure) didn't help.

Hank continues, "Fortunately the source code to the compiler was in source control, so I was able to run a debugger to find the problem. Here are the problem lines. Note that this is C++, not C, so std::string and helpers exist. See if you can guess why it didn't work."

108 comments - Last comment @ 2007-01-17

The Magnitude of Ineptitude

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-13

Today's Code Snippet comes from [Name blanked out to protect the innocent - Hereafter referred to as Mr. X.]. Mr X is a programmer who works on proprietary embedded systems which means that often what is considered by many to be "stdlib" functions aren't available and one has to first write the utilities that one needs. This, of course, allows for excellent possibility of spectacular results...

Mr X. writes, "I was recently required to port some code (originally written by a third-party) to a slightly different architecture, it was to be a journey; I laughed, I cried, I wanted to strangle someone... but hopefully I can summarize. I give you the atoi implementation from hell."

165 comments - Last comment @ 2012-06-05

The Mentor

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-08

Today's Code Snippet comes from Chris. Chris has had the distinct pleasure of being "mentored" by an amazing individual. Some time passed, then Chris bumped into The Mentor again. This time Chris had to rework a web site The Mentor had, dare I say, created? As Chris was going through the code for the page design, he noticed something curious about the footer. No matter where the page was scrolled to, the footer always showed up. "Very nice", he thought to himself, "I wonder where he got the script?" Turns out The Mentor had written it himself.

The layout for the site was made from a giant table with 1 row and 3 columns, navigation, content and a spacer column. The method he used to put the footer into place was interesting (putting it nicely). Instead of moving the footer itself and stretching the container with it (a widely documented process), The Mentor decided to resize the spacer image... one, pixel, at, a time.

51 comments - Last comment @ 2017-02-16

Investment Advice

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-08

Today's snippet, courtesy of James Curran, is short. However it has two problems. Can you spot them?

Which do you spot first? The major problem which happens rarely, or the minor problem which happens every call? I actually shouldn't call the second problem minor as I always treat memory leaks as a Big Deal TM.

111 comments - Last comment @ 2011-04-28

The Jewel of the File

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-06

Today's Code snippet comes to us from Jeff Miller. He was asked to take a look at a script that was running slowly. This script opened a file and read it in. One of the very first things he noticed was something that was happening with each pass of the loop that read the file.

He writes, "I noticed first off that the file was being re-opened with each pass of the loop and somehow it was managing to process each line of the file by only using ReadLine."

65 comments - Last comment @ 2007-07-03

Please Supply a Test Case

by Tim Gallagher in CodeSOD on 2006-11-02

Today's code snippet comes to us from Tobias Tobiasen. The company he works for used to include a third-party closed-source HTTP client in their product. Being a little worried about having to support their product without the source code for the HTTP client, they asked for a source code license. After paying an obscene amount of money for it (red flag #1) they finally got it.

While browsing though the source code, he found all sorts of odd comments like:

105 comments - Last comment @ 2007-09-13